Dear God^Wall does anyone have a working alsa (Debian packages) in Woody with a recent kernel? Does anyone know how alsa is supposed to be set up in Woody?
<RANT> I've finally upgraded the kernel (to 2.4.17) and tried to use Debian ALSA packages (again). Not entirely unexpectedly, ALSA broke. Hmm, lessee... 1. there are three alsa-source & utils packages: plain, 0.4, and 0.5. There's alsautils (in addition to 3 alsa-utils above), 2 alsaconfs, and a bunch of alsalib's that appear in "dpkg -l" output but not in aptitude's package list. Which of them do I need? Is it documented anywhere? 2. I have /etc/init.d/alsa, /etc/init.d/alsasound (not referenced in /etc/rc?.d's), and /etc/init.d/alsa has a ". /usr/share/alsa-base/snd-dev-utils". (Like, what? Can you say "NFS server is down"?) 3. There's /etc/alsa/modutils/0.5 (no, alsa-*-0.5 is not installed) and /etc/alsa/modutils/0.9. Both files seem to be generated by alsaconf; according to barfs from modprobe, both contain invalid options (I've a feeling the driver reads its options from someplace else entirely, though). 4. There are alsa aliases in both /etc/modules.conf and /etc/alsa/modutils/*. Well, at leas they seem to be consitent (I didn't look too closely, though). 5. To quote /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/README.Debian: * If you are using the kernel with devfs support, you need to enable the feature and mount it under /dev Huh? What feature? Enable where? How do I mount "it"? What does /usr/share/alsa-base/snd-dev-utils do, then, if not manage alsa sound devices? I can roll my own alsa setup, thankyouverymuch. (In fact, that's what I had working before this upgrade.) Should I purge all this alsa crap and go back to the Good Old Way? I'd rather keep Debian configuration & startup files & keep package database happy. Is there any fine manual I can read to find out how to do that? </RANT> Ok, I've exaggerated in some places, and I know that a lot of alsa suckage comes from upstream etc., but still... no need to add more suckage, is there? Dima -- We're sysadmins. Sanity happens to other people. -- Chris King
